Angela de la Cruz

... her paintings are homeless, ashamed, miserable, they have accidents, they get dirty, they are dragged across the floor, are torn and ripped, they fall on their butt, they bully and get bullied, they are crumpled and scrunched, severed and crushed. They endure this stream of mishaps and are transformed by them (recycled as the artist notes). At times they are abandoned in a studio corner and, from one day to the next, they can change from being something, to becoming nothing and re-emerge as something again. They are dejected but they persevere …

… de la Cruz’s paintings promote the idea of a sensuous, direct and familiar contact with the world around us, as opposed to the rarified abstractions of the modernist canon. They present us with a challenge to the traditional bourgeois ideals of predictability, stability and closure, of which the painting is the most obvious icon. As the artist observes: the moment I cut through the canvas I get rid of the grandiosity of painting. The processes of cutting, patching up, fitting back together, re-assembling are central to de la Cruz’s practice …

from: the pleasures of down below by Katya Garcia – Anton, 2001

… this notion of “destruction as creation” however is also very pertinent to the work of Angela de la Cruz, for it is through the quite literal act of destruction that a new language of painting is created and with that, the subsequent reinvention of painting. Her paintings have the appearance of having been violently attacked and physically abused. Hanging in her studio, they almost appear to result from her studio having been broken into and the infiltrators, out of frustration from not finding anything seemingly of value, deciding to destroy the paintings. Strechers are broken, surfaces of paintings slashed and booted through and canvases ripped off their strechers, in some cases, completely torn off. But the fact is that it is de la Cruz herself who has inflicted the violence and damage to her paintings, the remnants of which she is justifiably proud of, displaying them on the wall like trophies …